In Panaji, there was none of the opprobrium he had faced in Srinagar. At home, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had been criticised by the opposition National Conference for attending the India Ideas Conclave, an intellectual forum for the Hindutva right organised by Bharatiya Janata Party's Ram Madhav. But far away in Goa, as Sayeed delivered the keynote address at the conclave on Monday, the unambivalent response was cheerful ovation.

Sayeed, of course, said all the things his audience were eager to hear. Queried over whether he would reach out to the thousands of displaced Kashmiri Pandits, he said he had begun a rehabilitation process during his earlier 2002-’05 tenure. “My hope is that they come back. There were so many doctors, engineers among them,” he said.

Taking queries on the dangers of Islamic State, he said it could be countered by addressing the internal situation. “Give your people inside employment, security, equality and justice and there will be no danger from any external threat,” he said.

Good governance

It was a point the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister returned to more than once in his address. He said he made the choice to ally with the BJP after he was floored by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s focus on “transparency, good governance and development”. It was a choice he made despite objections from some within his party and offers from both the Congress and the National Conference.

At the same time, Sayeed cautioned repeatedly that the “the prime minister’s slogan of development, good governance and transparency took a backseat. Other issues have come to the fore." He was referring to the mob lynching of a teenage truck driver over rumours that he was transporting beef. To take India forward, the chief minister said, development had to be all inclusive. “If two brothers walk shoulder to shoulder, the country cannot go down. Kashmir would show the way.”

Asked about terrorism, he said the solution to it was democracy. “And democracy is a battle of ideas… By imprisoning and killing people, one cannot convince a man and change his ideas.” That is achieved through a democratic, administrative and economic process, which is why good governance, administration and development should be the watchwords, he cautioned.

To explain his decision to ally his People Democratic Party with the BJP, he drew a parallel with the 1975 Kashmir Accord between Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah and Indira Gandhi. It was the only comparable historical precedent to his predicament of 2014, he said, where two opposite and mutually antagonistic identities had to forge an understanding. Faced with a fractured mandate in the regions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh, he said balancing all three became essential in 2014.

Atmosphere of hatred

The 1975 Kashmir Accord, he said, “yielded immediate moral dividends”, lending legitimacy to the democratic and electoral process. Where pre-1975 interference in elections had robbed the process of growth, the accord brought about a tectonic shift in the ground reality. “I realised that we had to rework the paradigm of governance in such manner as to free it from the vice grip of a martyrdom-victimhood syndrome, the disloyalty-traitor syndrome." We do not have all the answers yet, he added, but there is inspiration to be drawn from the cherished and intrinsic composite cultural history of Kashmir.

He told his audience that “though much has been written about the people of Kashmir, a large volume of comment is based on an erroneous understanding of the character of the Kashmiris”. Kashmiris, he said, had stood up against the invasion in 1947, had rejected Jinnah’s two-nation theory, and had forged a relationship with India. The intricacies of how the three regions of the state would function had not been thrashed out at that time. Now, he said, he had been accorded the opportunity to cut a new path and end the friction between religious, regional and ethnic groups in the state. Any such "adventure was fraught with political hazards” but one had to choose between lesser gain or the larger good.

“Politics is the art of the possible. Politics is about managing, not resolving contradictions. But Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s work is not to manage the contradictions, I want to resolve the contradiction. We want to have a long-term solution. This atmosphere of hatred must go... I am telling the people of the country that Jammu and Kashmir wants to finish hatred between people.”